Guided waves for structural health monitoring

Conference of 56th Annual Conference of the British Institute of Non-Destructive Testing, NDT 2017 ; Conference Date: 5 September 2017 Through 7 September 2017; Conference Code:130921; International audience; Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) consists in permanently installing sensors onto or into a structure in order to monitor its health without disturbing its regular operating cycle. Guided wave (GW) based SHM relies on the propagation of GWs in plate-like or extruded structures. Because of their high sensitivity to geometrical singularities, GWs are suitable to detect structural flaws. Moreover, because GWs can be generated and measured with lightweight low-energy sensors such as piezoelectric sensors, GWs are often the ideal interrogation mean to detect and locate flaws in a SHM context. Despite the large literature on the use of GW for SHM, no GW-based SHM systems have yet reached a sufficient maturity level to be deployed in large scale industrial applications. The CEA-LIST conducts a substantial number of studies aiming at transferring these technologies from the laboratory towards the industry. This work includes the development of novel simulation tools, the improvement of existing imaging techniques along with their implementation on complex cases, the use of optical fibers to replace or complement piezoelectric sensors and limit the mass of the SHM system and the development of new GW-based techniques. This communication will describe these developments along with the perspectives of this work.